Pranav Seetharaman

I’m a software developer in IBM having recently completed my Integrated Master’s in Computer Science from IIIT Bangalore. Right from the 8th grade, I’d taken a fascination for computers and would love to experiment with them. School brought out the programming interest in me, and I extended this interest in college to real life problem solving through projects. Inventing and developing products and solutions have always excited me, and in my sophomore year I explored Android development, making a couple of apps too.
My friends and I participated as the 'Hulkbusters' team in the InOut 5 - 2018 hackathon and came into the top 5, which was an enriching experience for us in terms of getting to see a plethora of fascinating ideas apart from the opportunity to network with so many wonderful and brilliant like-minded enthusiats.
We participated in many more hackathons, and won the Kandy hackathon conducted in 2016, in Bangalore. Winning a hackathon reinstilled our confidence in our skills and we participated in many more hackathons, even getting shortlisted in the Daimler organized MBRDI hackathon in 2016. I have dabbled a lot across different fields, gathering an interest in image processing and computer vision, and did a 2-month internship when I was in my 3rd year, in the field of image processing in Zentron Labs Pvt Ltd, a machine vision startup in Bangalore. Machine and Deep Learning have also caught my eye recently, and have worked extensively in digital image processing, which helped me gain a summer research internship in Siemens Pvt Ltd, in my 4th year. The Siemens R&D internship was quite challenging in terms of scale and deadlines, as a knowledge base graph had to be created from the bottom up, but I learnt a lot about workplace product design and development apart from demands and client expectations. Hackathons will always excite us, as we get to brainstorm on different ideas, and try to bring them to fruition. Its not always about winning. The experience and exposure helps us to grow and improve on our skillsets thus becoming better versions of ourselves.